


hide / seek

by thehandsingsweapon



Series: in a future time; [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: And Smiling A Lot, Artist Phichit, Brief reference to Victor and Yuuri Living Their Best Lives, Graduate Students AU, Historian Seung-gil, M/M, Opposites Attract, Phichit Seduces Seung-gil by Shutting Up While He Reads, Phichit uses IOS, Seung-gil uses Android, Seung-gil's Matchmaking Dog Knows What Is Up, This Tells You Everything You Need To Know About Their Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 07:13:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16471130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: “Smile,” Phichit grumbles at the dour docent standing watch on his way out. “It won’t kill you, will it?”The docent looks back at him; he’d be handsome if he wasn’t so severe looking, Phichit decides.Coffee. You need coffee.He’s delusional to think this about a grouchy Korean with big eyebrows and dark eyes and a wry twist to his mouth, you know what, nevermind —“You never know,” quips dark and handsome. It’s the sort of dry humor Phichit almost never reaches for, too subtle and restrained. “Better safe than sorry.”These are words that speak to a small life. Phichit nearly pities him. “That’s no way to live.”As mid-morning draws to a close, both of them wind up thinking nearly the same thing, something like this:Besides, what would he know?---Lee Seung-gil is a ph.D student with a part-time job working as a docent at the local art museum; Phichit Chulanont is an extrovert with a selfie stick on a mission. They say you can't ever take back a bad first impression, but when a personal project of Phichit's piques Seung-gil's interest they both learn a little bit more about how people have layers.You know, like onions. Onions have layers.





	hide / seek

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doeinstinct](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doeinstinct/gifts).



If Seung-gil had a dollar for every time he’s had to watch some asshole with a selfie stick set up shop inside the museum to photograph themselves in front of an exhibit, he’d be infinitely less concerned about the graduate debt he’s steadily accumulating when not working as a docent. Today’s edition is an extrovert with an entire cadre of friends who’ve come with him, each of them dragged around the room as he points out different features of the oriental vases, jugs, and jars Seung-gil is silently watching over. He’s intolerably cheerful for how early in the morning it is, and it’s only day one of the new exhibit, so Seung-gil’s patience for this much chatter is rather limited: after a weekend full of overtime, all he’s got to show for it is a slightly larger paycheck, an irritable husky, and the fact that he’d nearly slept through this morning’s alarms.

Besides, the kid’s got a smile that’s too white, all teeth. It’s the kind of thing most people would find incredibly charming, since his eyes crinkle, too, but Seung-gil isn’t most people. He knows this is one of _those_ grins, the sort that can’t be trusted. So when the visitor steps up to one of the cases — nose nearly to the glass — Seung-gil pointedly clears his throat.

With anyone else, it’s a strategy that would work flawlessly. It’s one of the reasons he loves this job so much: he’s getting real museum experience, and has every excuse to prowl around the building taking notes on the history of all sorts of artifacts. For the most part, all he has to do is glare and scowl at guests until they behave. Every so often he has to offer directions. It’s a minimal amount of interaction, which is good; Seung-gil knows he’s not what they call a _people person._

This man turns and looks at him with a flicker of defiance and irritation in his gaze.

 _Tch,_ thinks Seung-gil.

 _Rude,_ thinks Phichit Chulanont, who flips his phone around and turns Snapchat on once again. He flashes a winning smile and a peace symbol at the screen before turning his camera onto the jar kept behind the glass, and then at the neat label alongside. _Lai Nam Thong jar,_ it reads. _Late 19_ _th_ _Century._ Then he grins and types a message, and sends it off to the family story:

As much as he’d love to stay, Phichit has promised his friends brunch at the little creperie around the corner in exchange for dragging them all to the museum doors right at its opening hours. “Smile,” he grumbles at the dour docent standing watch on his way out. “It won’t kill you, will it?”

The docent looks back at him; he’d be handsome if he wasn’t so severe looking, Phichit decides. _Coffee. You need coffee._ He’s delusional to think this about a grouchy Korean with big eyebrows and dark eyes and a wry twist to his mouth, _you know what,_ _nevermind_ —

“You never know,” quips dark and handsome. It’s the sort of dry humor Phichit almost never reaches for, too subtle and restrained. “Better safe than sorry.”

These are words that speak to a small life. Phichit nearly pities him. “That’s no way to live.”

As mid-morning draws to a close, both of them wind up thinking nearly the same thing, something like this:

_Besides, what would he know?_

 

\- - - - - 

 

Phichit is thirteen years old when he has a conversation that sets the course for his career; he’s in Chiang Rai, visiting his Grandparents at the resort they’ve managed since he was a child. Each room of the hotel opens out into a swimming pool they’re supposed to reserve for the tourists, people who sip fancy drinks and eat _pad see ew_ and wander through Chiang Rai’s holy places to admire statues and be awed by the ornate ceilings, without any actual understanding of what it is that they’re looking at. He has noticed, for the first time, a series of glass cases by the reception desk, featuring beautiful, colorful pottery. What catches his eyes aren’t the traditional patterns of the flowers or the accents of gold; it’s the seams in the porcelain, places where the jars and plates have been carefully knit back together.

 _Why keep something, if it’s broken like this?_ He wants to know.

His grandmother smiles fondly. _Because they’re ours,_ she says.

She tells him the story of an artist named Sarit Chulanont, and of the territory losses of Siam to France, and how the pieces that were chipped or flawed escaped the greed of colonizers and the subsequent chaos of coups.

 _Where do you think they took the rest,_ wonders Phichit. He has only just begun to study the history of the world at large, is now at the sort of age where he can grasp the distance that exists between Chiang Rai and France.

_Who knows. Scattered to the four winds, probably._

He contemplates this, and smiles a little bit, tilting his head in that way that he has. His sisters say it always precedes trouble, because Phichit is an inquisitive child, and never takes no for an answer.

“Do you know how to make them?”

 

\- - - - - 

 

Seung-gil Lee is the son of a surgeon. His parents have high expectations, which is why he learns to play the violin and takes advanced math classes while the rest of his family waits with baited breath to find out precisely what sort of scientist he’s going to be. _An engineer I think,_ crows one Auntie, only to be swiftly corrected by his grandfather: _No, no. A physicist!_

It isn’t completely _un_ interesting: in these classes there’s a kind of neat, technical precision that Seung-gil respects. He never fails to find his way to the right answer once he understands how their systems work. Underneath the aura of thoughtful, quiet student, Seung-gil has a competitive streak that’s miles wide, and as soon as it occurs to him that he can arrange his classes into systems of study like this, maximize his grades, he immediately applies himself to the task.

He doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to be, but whatever it is, he’s going to be _the best._

It’s an English Literature paper which finally breaks him, with a mark that’s not even all that terrible. Even before he’s really read the teacher’s notes, Seung-gil is already calculating the odds of retaining his place as valedictorian, shuffling his study schedule around to optimize for a little extra time as the class goes on to read _The Illiad,_ which is on the schedule for next month.

Then he steels himself and reads the note left for him at the top of the page in the red scrawl that so rarely appears in all of his other courses:

 _Writing technique is stiff and formulaic. I think you’re telling me what you think I want to hear, Mr. Lee. What is it that_ **_you_ ** _think?_

At first he thinks it’s a perfectly ridiculous question to ask. Certainly not worth the fifteen points he lost on the assignment. By the morning of the next day, he’s already decided to dispute it with his teacher after class.

They’re finishing up on Catch-22, circling back on its original premise: 

> _There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to._

For whatever reason, he loses his nerve. Maybe because this is another one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situations: he can fight the lousy grade, and maybe win, but if he does, all he’ll have done is postponed its lesson for just a little while longer.

At home, his parents hardly notice the quiet click of his door, upstairs in their house. They have a well-oiled routine that’s been just barely disrupted by this little sliver of dissonance; his mother asks _what are you doing_ and Seung-gil tells her he’s _studying_ except now it’s not as true as it once was. He breezes through his homework, careless with it for the first time in years, and then he opens _The Illiad._

He reads and reads until his mother comes upstairs to remind him he still has to practice.

Increasingly encouraged to find himself, to be a little selfish, he goes on to do something else just a little bit off-course. The husky’s the first thing he asks for that’s just for him: he meets her as a senior in high school, volunteering at a pet shelter to get his honors hours in. She’s there, loud and noisy in her cage, with the vet assistant rattling away about how bored huskies get and how challenging they are to keep at home. Evidently someone named her _Shadow,_ although she’s the least stealthy thing he’s ever seen, overly rambunctious and prone to howls.

He waits until his SAT scores are in to ask for her. It’s a calculated move. From then on, they’re inseparable, so maybe the name fits after all.

Suddenly, Seung-gil is in his first semester at university, taking Shadow out for a walk when he realizes he can ask for more than just the one thing, and that’s when he changes his major.

_History and literature? Are you crazy?_

 

\- - - - - 

 

Seung-gil blinks and the summer is over. Now, he’s back on campus for the second year of his ph.D, due to attend the one and only art history class he’s snuck into his course load after arguing for its usefulness in his particular specialization. While the other students catch up about their summers, good-naturedly complaining about their research assignments or returning to the grind, he picks an optimal seat and pulls out his laptop, opening a fresh document for his notes from a folder system he’s had organized ever since registration.

Professor Park brings the whole room to order, and has just started her slides when the door opens, admitting a single tardy student in a black baseball cap who looks familiar in a way that Seung-gil can’t quite place. Where others might have quietly slunk to the back of the class, this man flashes perfectly white-teeth and a smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Sorry,” he apologizes blithely. “First time I’ve had a class in this building.” Then, to Seung-gil’s horror, he makes his way up the center row of the lecture hall, determined to select the first good seat still available.

It happens to be the one directly to Seung-gil’s left, sharing the same table.

With a heavy sigh he gives up his premium position right on the aisle’s exit to scoot in, which is the most efficient and polite thing to do in this situation. The bright smile and quick thanks he gets in return is received with what Seung-gil thinks is a situationally appropriate nod, before he attempts to redirect his attention to the start of the lecture. Meanwhile, his new neighbor sets down a still-steaming chai tea and proceeds to shuffle through his bag for a black notebook and a mechanical pencil. It’s a process that takes longer than it really should, in Seung-gil’s opinion, and out of the corner of his eye, he’s able to determine why: the other man’s bag is covered in an array of pins, the majority of which seem to represent some kind of rodent, and the interior contents are absolute chaos. Only once the stranger’s flipped past several pages full of sketches in his notebook does Seung-gil finally think there will be peace at their table.

He’s wrong about this.

“You’re the docent,” whispers his table-mate suddenly. “I knew I recognized you!”

Seung-gil catches himself grinding his teeth and stops immediately. It’s not enough to prevent him from issuing a toneless correction. “I’m _a_ docent,” he mutters back.

“What?”

“There’s like thirty of us.” Out of the corner of his eye, he realizes he’s receiving an incredulous smile, and glances over to raise an eyebrow at the other man, who devolves into chuckles he does a very poor job of keeping quiet.

 _“Oh my god,”_ he hisses, trying and failing to contain his laughter. “You really are like that all the time.”

“Gentlemen,” says Professor Park, in the teacher voice that everyone knows means business, “something to share with the class?”

“No,” Seung-gil grinds out, between his teeth. Next to him, the troublemaker looks perfectly angelic. He twirls the pencil between deft fingers, and then writes something in his notebook, tilting it in Seung-gil’s direction.

 _Phichit,_ it says. When Seung-gil lifts an eyebrow again, he writes: _my name. Phichit Chulanont._

Then he offers the pencil to Seung-gil, who resigns himself to fate.

 _Lee Seung-gil,_ he writes back.

By the end of class, Phichit has also wrangled his way into having Seung-gil’s phone number, for study purposes, evidently, which Seung-gil is absolutely sure he’s going to regret.

 

\- - - - - 

 

 

“God, he’s useless,” Phichit complains to Pop, who’s currently munching on a carrot on his chest. “Fumbles his way into true love last summer and now —”

His phone chimes.

 

\- - - - - 

 

“… And I don’t want any funny business in Room 22,” Seung-gil’s boss tells him, as he clocks in on one rainy November weekend. “The curators have put a no-photos policy in place in there while they do some research, and if anyone makes a fuss about it, you send them to me, alright?”

Seung-gil’s curiosity gets the better of him. “Anything wrong?” He asks.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” says his manager, who glances up at the clock and waves a dismissive hand. “It’s almost opening time. Get to your station.”

Seung-gil does so, taking a seat in the chair by the door. Outside the sleet has intensified; he’s certain that they’ll have low traffic today, thanks to the lousy weather. Unlike some of his classmates, his job does not afford him time to multi-task or study; he’s got nothing better to do than watch the rain outside the window and then realize, rapidly, that the Lai Nam Thong jar he’s spent the better part of six months watching people come stare at has been removed from its display.

 _Research, huh,_ he thinks. _Weird._

 

\- - - - - 

 

 

The first thing Seung-gil notices is that it’s not a _small thing,_ the way Phichit had said.

This is a raging end-of-semester party, held at someone’s house close to campus. It’s the sort of thing he hasn’t gone to since he was in his first year at undergrad, released from the stifling routine of his parents’ household, making all kinds of mistakes involving late nights and alcohol that he’d largely prefer to forget.

Back then he’d confused these kinds of choices with freedom, before eventually realizing they weren’t quite the same thing: just a different kind of decision, tantalizingly dressed up in all the things he grew up with so little of. Standing on the walkway leading up to the porch, Seung-gil hesitates. He only vaguely recalls the last one of these things he attended: the fact that he’d propositioned a married man while under the influence remains a running joke among the small group of friends he retains from his undergraduate years.

He grits his teeth, because Phichit has already wrangled a promise to attend out of him, and Seung-gil usually does not go back on his word.

 _One beer,_ he tells himself. _One._

 

\- - - - - 

 

_Shots! Shots! Shots!_

In the course of the last hour or so, Phichit Chulanont has learned more about Lee Seung-gil than he’s been able to uncover in the entire semester: Seung-gil is competitive, for instance, with a stubborn streak that Phichit has always thought existed, but never understood the depths of. It’s on full display now as Seung-gil slams a shot back, determined to drink an art history major under the table in spite of an alarming disadvantage in size (the other guy looks like he makes it to the gym at least four days a week) and tolerance (Seung-gil’s face is hopelessly flushed, nearly tomato-red).

Seung-gil smiles more when he’s drunk. More endearingly. Gone is the tight-lipped, restrained thing he flashes in classes or around strangers. Phichit has understood from the beginning that he’s dealing with a serious introvert, his opposite in so many ways, but alcohol loosens Seung-gil’s posture, and smooths out the tension in his shoulders. Even his eyes are softer, as he unsteadily pours another round and looks back at Phichit. “What, you don’t think I can win?”

Phichit considers his answer carefully. “I think if anyone could win a game of shots with just the force of their will, it would be you,” he says.

“You think I’m smart,” Seung-gil hums. He’s almost bragging about it, looking over at the other student with a smirk as though to say _see? Phichit thinks I’m going to destroy you._

That’s not quite what Phichit thinks. But he is charmed, and that’s worse.

“I think you’re a genius,” Phichit and his three beers say back. It’s the sort of thing that he needs to not say, because the semester has convinced him that Seung-gil is never going to be interested the way that Phichit is interested, that is to say, interested-with-a-capital-I- _Interested_. And yet, here Phichit is, sending the Korean more photos of his hamsters and inviting him out to places, because evidently he has a soft spot for broody eyebrows and a predilection for suffering.

“Well,” says Seung-gil, with a noticeable slur, and slowly, as though he’s trying the words out, “I think you’re brilliant.”

“What?”

Seung-gil downs his shot, ignoring the two shocked stares he’s currently the recipient of. “And cute.” he murmurs, almost to himself. “’S almost obnoxious.”

Phichit has created a monster. He stares, helplessly, at the art history student whose win had previously been assured. “Nope,” says gym-guy, who wants no part in whatever’s about to unfold here. “Hard pass.” Personally, Phichit feels that’s slightly unfair. All the other guy is having to tolerate is chatty Seung-gil. Phichit is having to cope with this sudden plunge into an alternative reality where Seung-gil has called him _brilliant_ and _cute_ within the same fifteen seconds. “Congrats,” he tells Seung-gil. “You win.”

And then he abandons Phichit in the bizarro dimension where Seung-gil compliments him and smiles more often. 

Phichit is supposed to have something suave and clever to say. For once, he’s out of options. “You think I’m cute,” he echoes uselessly, although Seung-gil is already standing up, his brow furrowed, the way Phichit’s seen it whenever Seung-gil is tackling some difficult test, certain to emerge triumphant.

“Wait,” Seung-gil nearly shouts at the retreating man’s back. He bumps into Phichit along the way, insistent, and nearly bowls him over. Even after the collision, he doesn’t step back; just stands there with both hands on Phichit’s shoulders to steady himself, yelling after someone who has no intention of still speaking to him. “what do I win?”

Phichit’s three beers have a hand hooked into Seung-gil’s coat before he’s recognized the impulse. “This,” says Phichit, who mashes their lips together.

This isn’t how he’d imagined things would go. Phichit has imagined Seung-gil tensing up, surprised; has figured that he’d be the one to take the lead. He has not known to expect the catch of Seung-gil’s breath against his mouth, or the sudden step forward, or the shifting of hands down to his hips.

They’re interrupted by a wolf-whistle in the background, and when Phichit looks up, Seung-gil is as inscrutable as ever, both his eyebrows raised.

“Do you want to get out of here?” Asks Phichit.

“… Yeah,” says Seung-gil. “… Sure.”

 

\- - - - - 

 

In the morning, Seung-gil is gone.

Phichit makes it through two whole days of silence before he breaks down and texts Seung-gil himself. What he gets back shouldn’t be as much of a surprise as it is. 

 

A small part of Phichit almost writes back, almost lies. He types a few different responses suggesting he’s not looking to get serious before erasing them all, and leaving Seung-gil on read. _That’s that,_ he thinks, because Seung-gil is getting a ph.D in history, Phichit is finishing his masters in art, and this one semester of overlap is done with now.

Over the holidays, he does his best to ignore pictures of Yuuri and Victor together in Ephesus on Victor’s instagram, and tells himself he doesn’t need what they have.

 

\- - - - - 

 

In January, Seung-gil returns to a snow-covered, stark campus. He rushes into the student union between one class and the next, in pursuit of a cup of coffee to warm his frozen fingers back up. The campus coffee shop is the worst, really, but when he’s in a hurry and it’s freezing outside, Seung-gil’s learned to settle. Once he’s put in his order, he wanders over to the place where they always leave a pile of campus newspapers and feels his steps come to a grinding halt.

Phichit Chulanont’s mega-watt smile is plastered on the front page.

 **One Art Student’s Quest to Attribute Local Museum’s Masterpiece,** declares the headline, which Seung-gil has to read three different times before he really processes the words.

He’s normally very good at compartmentalizing.

It’s just that Phichit has one of those smiles that commits highway robbery in broad daylight.

Seung-gil tells himself the subtle tremor of his hands is from the cold as he gets his coffee, and the paper, and tucks himself into a back booth where he can read the paper with some semblance of privacy.

 

> _Phichit Chulanont remembers the first day he ever learned about Lai Nam Thong jars. He says he was a teenager visiting his family in Chiang Rai when he noticed his grandparents had installed a pottery display in their resort. “All the pieces were chipped or cracked and repaired in someway,” he explains. “But they were so beautiful. I really wanted to learn more about them.”_
> 
> _Chulanont, 23, is a first-year graduate student in the College of Arts. He’s followed in his Great-Great Grandfather’s footsteps, and is known for his work producing pottery and sculpture that fuses traditional methods with bright, modern sensibilities. “I did my undergraduate work in England,” he explains. “After my Grandmother told me the story of Sarit’s work, I was really determined to study abroad, because I thought it’d be easiest to try to figure out what happened to his art if I was in Europe, or see if I could find any pieces from that era that reminded me of what my family has, back home.” Orientalism, Chulanont notes, created extraordinary demand for works produced by craftsmen like his Great-Great-Grandfather, and many of the pieces that made their way from Southeast Asia back to Europe were acquired under dubious conditions. “Every country except for Siam was occupied, and the balance of power was pretty unfair. Some artists had their works seized after arbitrary charges, and others traded their wares wholly unaware of the high prices they were going for back in the European markets …”_
> 
> _Chulanont hasn’t yet compiled enough evidence to fully make his case about the origins of the Lai Nam Thong jar formerly on display at the Art Institute, although he says he’s shared photographic evidence of the similarities between the jar and the pieces back in Chiang Rai with the museum’s management teams, a decision which he evidently regrets. Chulanont alleges the museum’s management is worried enough about his claims that they’ve taken the piece off of display for seemingly no reason. “They say they’re conducting research,” he says, “but nobody’s been in touch with me.”_

 

\- - - - - 

 

The closest park to campus with a leash-free zone is snow-filled and nearly empty, which makes it absolutely perfect for Shadow. After smoothing snowflakes off of a nearby bench, Seung-gil hurls a tennis ball through the air, and watches his husky dart after it, a charcoal-colored burst in a field of pure white. Like Seung-gil, she likes the cold; albeit probably for different reasons. He likes the stark clarity of winter, the silver sliver of the trees, the way his breath fogs up in front of his face.

His dog likes the chaos of disrupting a pristine field of white.

When Shadow doesn’t return right away, Seung-gil scans the park, discovers her lavishing attention on a young man bundled up in a burgendy peacoat off in the distance. When she peppers the stranger’s face with a sloppy kiss and then bowls him over, as huskies are wont to do, Seung-gil sighs and gets up to manage the appropriate apologies every husky owner is obligated to make at one point or another, something like: _sorry, she’s very excitable…_

He loses the words when he realizes it’s Phichit looking up at him from underneath a knit cap, his face somewhat obscured by a big, fluffy scarf.

“… I thought she looked familiar,” Phichit murmurs, getting up before Seung-gil can even think to offer a hand. Seung-gil’s thoughts move slowly, now, lost on the highway between that night in December and the article he’s just read. “She’s as cute as your pictures,” Phichit says, and opens a mitten to reveal that he’s been gifted Shadow’s ratty old tennis ball.

“Thanks,” manages Seung-gil. _Better safe than sorry,_ he remembers saying once, and Phichit had told him that was no way to live a life, and now here he is, trapped without words.

“I won’t keep you,” Phichit says, smile hidden by his scarf. Seung-gil already sees the way it doesn’t meet his eyes.

“So what research do you have?” He asks, a moment after Phichit’s already turned to walk away.

“What?”

“About the jar,” Seung-gil clarifies. “I saw the article in the paper.”

Phichit hesitates and Seung-gil holds his breath. “Look,” he says finally, “it’s really cold, and I just wanted a coffee, and —”

Seung-gil doesn’t know why he pushes. Maybe, he thinks, for once, he’s tired of silence. There was a kind of routine in Phichit’s messages: pictures of his hamsters, or in-progress sculptures, or concept sketches from his classes. A bright, bubbly noise, burbling like a brook. Seung-gil wasn’t sure he’d wanted to be in it, but he hadn’t minded being nearby so much, watching it stream by, watching Phichit flit through his own life like a very brightly colored kite. “… Deja Brew allows dogs,” he says. It’s his favorite coffee shop, and just a few blocks away. “Explain it to me there.”

Phichit’s eyebrows rise, and he studies Seung-gil for half-a-second longer than necessary. “Yeah,” he says, almost the same way Seung-gil had said once, lips still humming from their kiss. “… Sure.”

It turns out Phichit has an awful lot of research. He hasn’t been permitted to do any analysis on the jar itself, because the museum thinks he’s a troublesome amateur, but he’s got a similar piece at his apartment — a fragment of a cup, he says, in case he ever has the opportunity to do an up-close analysis on the painting style or the pigments themselves. Seung-gil sits in silence, scratching behind Shadow’s ears, while Phichit scrolls through photo after photo on his phone of the artwork back in Chiang Rai which triggered this life’s quest.

It’s nice to listen to the sound of his voice again, Seung-gil realizes. “How’d they come by it in the first place?”

Phichit scrunches up his nose. _Adorable,_ thinks Seung-gil, who has to blink the word away, zeroing in on the explanation he gets. “The museum? They bought it at an estate auction, eight years ago. I found a receipt for that owner, who got it from a vintage gallery in New York, but nothing else. I called in a favor with my ex-roommate’s boyfriend, but so far he hasn’t figured out how it got to America, either. So that’s it. That’s all I know.”

“Huh,” murmurs Seung-gil.

“Yep,” says Phichit, who puts a popping emphasis on the trailing _p_. “So now you know,” he says, and flips his phone back to the home screen, which isn’t hamsters, the way Seung-gil expects, but a photo of what seems to be his family. He counts two sisters and each of Phichit’s parents before Phichit’s screen goes black. “Nothing’s going to come of it,” he says, with a sudden and uncharacteristic cynicism that feels out of left field. “I’ve got to get to class now.”

This time, Seung-gil lets him go. The husky huffs, and props her chin on his knee, and long after the bells on the door have emphasized Phichit’s sudden departure and Seung-gil’s coffee has gone cold does he bother admitting what Shadow’s dark eyes already seem to know.

“I lied to him before,” Seung-gil mutters, as the dog’s ears perk forward.

_There’s nothing for it, now._

Phichit’s clearly going to move on. So should he.

 

\- - - - - 

 

Except he doesn’t.

He’s tired, and cranky, and stuck on the work of his own thesis, and Seung-gil is fooling nobody, least of all himself, when he navigates to a different part of the library and carefully selects a fresh pile of books about the Kingdom of Siam. He spends hours pouring through the Rattanakosin Era. He skims over the establishment of Bangkok as the capital and then begins his work in earnest, methodically outlining the periodic conflicts of the nation with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma, followed by each crisis manufactured by the French.

It’s the territory losses he eventually zeroes in on.

Phichit, he realizes slowly, has been working backwards from the museum’s acquisition of the jar.

Seung-gil is subconsciously working forward.

 _I’m going to need a lot of ship’s manifests and customs papers,_ Seung-gil realizes, neatly categorizing city names and train routes into a fresh document on his laptop. _A_ ** _lot_** _of them._

 

\- - - - - 

 

 

He takes a picture, too: of an old art anthology laid open to a portrait of a woman reading in the corner of her parlor. On the mantlepiece is a vase of flowers, its pattern barely evident, trimmed in a slim circle of gold.

The response comes almost immediately.

Phichit insists he meet him in the park, even though it’s nearly two in the morning by the time they both get there. The snow’s been replaced by the kind of wet and cold that marks the changing of the guard from winter to spring; it’s taken two months for Seung-gil to find that portrait and so far he hasn’t been able to confirm anything other than the woman’s name and the fact that she was the wife of a French major once deployed abroad.

It’s not enough to jump to conclusions with, much less use as the basis of a hypothesis on origins and traceability. Already Seung-gil regrets sharing it. He should have stuck to his original instincts, should have waited until he had a finished product, flawless and indisputable.

He doesn’t want to get Phichit’s hopes up, he realizes, and then this thought is shattered by none other than Phichit’s voice. Phichit looks ridiculous: he’s in a pair of flannel pajama pants that, unsurprisingly, feature hamsters, and a sweater that’s so big for him that it hangs off of his shoulder. Seung-gil’s done little better for himself, in track pants and a windbreaker, no doubt looking every bit the part of someone who’s strung together too many nights in a row in the library’s research wing. Phichit skips his usual niceties and skips straight to the point:

“Why’d you go looking for this?”

“I thought I could help.” Seung-gil mutters, kicking a pebble a bit down the path. He suspects they both know that he isn’t the sort of person who usually goes extraordinarily out of his way to help anyone. He’s polite, sure, mechanically so, sometimes, but this is something else. “… It’s what I’m good at,” he adds. “Not _helping,_ I mean. Research.”

“Research,” Phichit echoes, his brow knit.

Seung-gil misses the brightness of his smile and the crafty crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Research,” he repeats. _Don’t get your hopes up,_ he thinks, as Phichit studies him again. He feels transparent, thin as paper, unshielded _:_ all words that perfectly describe why he’s eschewed entanglements for so long and why he was a lot better off before Phichit’s crafty grin battered its way into his life.

He misses it, though: that grin.

Phichit’s smile only pulls at one corner of his mouth, but it’s a start. “… Can I help?” He asks. His eyes crinkle a little, the way they used to. Seung-gil exhales a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Helping’s the part I’m good at.”

 

\- - - - - 

 

Phichit begins to measure his time in library visits. He learns that Seung-gil is a night owl; that when he reads in the library he does it curled up into one of the hideous armchairs near the encyclopedias, listening to a wide variety of music on shuffle from his phone and slowly destroying his back. Seung-gil leaves one earbud out when Phichit comes to help him, just in case they talk, but they don’t always talk: they shuffle through records in companionable silence until Seung-gil notes that he has to go home to walk the dog.

Sometimes, Phichit comes with him. The weather gets warmer. He watches Shadow fetch the tennis ball dozens of times, learns to take note of the way Seung-gil changes when he’s at ease, when he’s most himself _,_ when the word _dissertation_ isn’t hanging over his head like a noose and when he’s not worried about whether or not he’s going to impress.

“You should show all this to Professor Park,” Seung-gil says, one day, pushing a folder full of papers over to Phichit. They’ve made significant progress, building the case for the jar’s origins steadily and meticulously. It’s not the way Phichit usually works, but he’s come to appreciate Seung-gil’s method, and the resolute way he goes about any task. “She’ll support you.”

“She’ll support us,” Phichit corrects. Next to him, Seung-gil gives an ambivalent shrug.

“It’s your project,” he says. “I just wanted to help.”

His phone vibrates with an alarm. Phichit has already learned what it’s for. It’s 3:15 PM on a Tuesday, and Seung-gil has a class on Modern World History to go TA.

He leaves Phichit there with a powder-blue folder full of everything Phichit’s ever wanted.

So why, then, is it so dissatisfying?

 

\- - - - - 

 

 

\- - - - - 

 

When Seung-gil arrives, Phichit’s already nursing a coffee in the corner, worrying the edges of the mug with fidgety fingers, sneakers swinging from the high chair. For once, Seung-gil bypasses the line; he’s been vaguely anxious since reading Phichit’s messages off his watch partway through class. He pulls up a chair and immediately regrets his decision. A cup of tea would give his hands something else to do. “Well?”

“I need you to tell me why you helped me out,” Phichit says. There’s a strange urgency to his voice, a mystery there that Seung-gil isn’t good at decoding. People have never been the kind of puzzles he’s been interested in. Perhaps that’s why he so frequently only reads about them once they’re dead and gone, their lives boiled down to essential facts.

“I told you,” Seung-gil replies. It’s true but not quite the truth. The actual truth, he figures, is more complicated, and has something to do with that one night in December, and how he can’t remember the name of the guy he played shots against, and can’t forget the way Phichit kisses, with all the brightness and urgency of a shooting star, breathless and smiling. Judging by the way Phichit’s brow furrows and his fingers clench around the mug, this isn’t the right answer. He tries for something a little closer. “I … I thought I’d do something nice,” he says. He’s not ready to say anything else. “For you.”

“Nice,” breathes Phichit. “Why bother — you know what, listen. I followed Yuuri’s shitty advice and went home and did a shot to get brave enough to say this to you, and —”

“I go for the ones I can’t keep,” Seung-gil interrupts him, suddenly. “It’s a lot easier.”

“Sorry?”

“Unavailable people,” Seung-gil repeats. He’s made unavailable people his type. It’s easier going in that way; he scratches an itch, but his expectations are low. He can’t ever be hurt. He levels Phichit with a look. “That’s why I told you I didn’t —”

 _“Better safe than sorry,”_ Phichit echoes.

“Something like that.”

“Sounds like a shitty way to live,” Phichit reminds him, but there’s no teasing spark in his eyes, just a pointed stare that carries a sharp, sharp warning.

Seung-gil senses that he’s standing on a precipice. A step in either direction will be irreversible.

“Sometimes it is,” he agrees quietly. He considers it; thinks about those easy hours in the library, or the mischief in Phichit’s smile, or the way it’d been so easy to let his hands drift down to Phichit’s hipbones and trace them.

Across from him, Phichit keeps dragging a finger around the rim of his coffee mug. Seung-gil finally reaches over to stop him, though his touch is soft. Phichit has pretty hands with clay and paint under his fingernails; it’s just another one of those little contradictions that Seung-gil has learned to like.

“I did it because I wanted to apologize.”

“So apologize,” Phichit says.

Seung-gil does.

 

\- - - - - 

 

 **_Graduate Students Trace Origins of Lai Nam Thong Jar Back to Late 19_ ** **_ th _ ** **_Century Thailand_ **

 

> _It starts with a man who makes pottery. His pieces are beautiful and intricate, and as they’re traded in the far northern reaches of Siam, they catch the eye of a French major with a fiancee back home. After his superiors manufacture another crisis, and the territory gets ceded to France, he seizes a full set of ceramic pieces from a Siamese official during the transition, all of them finely painted, and brings them home for his wife._
> 
> _The pieces show up on a shipping manifest in Toulon as he returns home, erroneously labeled ‘LAOTIAN DISHES.’ Four years later, a local artist paints a portrait of the major’s wife with a gilded vase from the set up on the mantle — a show of the family’s growing influence, and their international reach._
> 
> _Then the war comes. He’s an older man by now, and retired, not that it matters much, but his son goes to the trenches and never comes back. His daughter, a nurse, sees an English patient with an amputated arm. When peace finally comes, they marry. She crosses the channel with him by ferry with a trunk full of clothes and a box of a few favorite gifts._
> 
> _The jar shows up for the first time in a family photograph of their parlor in Brighton, just two years before they move to New York._
> 
> _And then the Great Depression hits._
> 
> _**LOT 124,** reads the auction card. **FAR-EASTERN POTTERY.**_
> 
> _The Lai Nam Thong jar is just one of six others on the block. A local art dealer buys it at fire-sale prices, and sells it, after the second war, to a collector who’d come by his vintage store and fancied the bright colors._
> 
> _In 2010, a museum curator finds it at an estate sale._
> 
> _In 2018, two students retrace its origins together across one hundred and twenty years. It has traveled 8,136 miles, across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Atlantic. Now it lives in a glass case in a museum in Chicago, where the story nearly started, and where it also comes to an end._

 

\- - - - - 

 

“It’s a little weird to realize we met here, don’t you think?” Phichit asks, without looking back to see if Seung-gil’s even paying attention to him. It’s taken him these past few months to realize that Seung-gil is always paying attention, even when his face betrays nothing. He is forever stoic, nowhere near as emotionally expressive as Phichit is, but his feelings show through in his choices, in the fact that he’s here, in this room, right now. Phichit has been critically inspecting the new label card freshly installed below his Great-Great Grandfather’s Lai Nam Thong jar. _Sarit Chulanont,_ it reads. _1898\. Donated by the Chulanont family, Chiang Rai, Thailand._

As expected, Seung-gil makes a noncommittal noise, and Phichit feels his lips twitch. “Time for a picture, I think,” he says, and rummages through his messenger bag for the selfie stick he never leaves home without. He can’t help but break into a broad grin as Seung-gil rolls his eyes.

“I hate those things, you know,” Seung-gil mutters. Except he doesn’t resist as Phichit hooks a finger into the belt loop of his slacks and drags him into the frame, and his hand lingers on the small of Phichit’s back.

“I know,” hums Phichit. At the last second he turns and plants a kiss right on the fine slant of Seung-gil’s sharp cheekbone, and then double-checks the series of three photos, cackling with glee when he sees irrefutable evidence of the subtle widening of Seung-gil’s eyes and the dawning of his small, reflexive smile.

“Take a look,” he says, and grins. “It’s a classic.”

**Author's Note:**

> Lai Nam Thong vases were technically only for royalty but Phichit is the prince of all of our hearts, isn't he? 
> 
> Title's an Ed Sheeran reference: _Give a little time to me or burn this out; we'll play hide and seek to turn this around..._
> 
> * edit: now that we can reveal our Art History fics, I can also note that this has secret references to in a future time and add it to the series!


End file.
